Who is Yayoi Kusama?

Yayoi Kusama is, as she herself declares, a modern day “Alice in Wonderland”,
with the only difference being that she creates the miracles herself.

Born in Japan in 1929, the 93-year-old artist has been living voluntarily in a psychiatric hospital in Japan since 1970.
She goes out every day to go to her studio and comes back in the evening.
In 1958, she went to New York to meet the abstract impressionists who were her idols at the time.
He has always been a man of many talents, since over the years he has been involved in the perfomance arts,
photography, sculpture and much more.
This is the reason why we cannot give it a title or easily classify it into an art movement.
Today, of course, she is considered an abstract expressionist.

The course of the

She quickly entered the Avant Garde scene in New York and in 1966 produced her first play, which was no other,
of her dressed in a traditional pink kimono with white flowers walking in all
the long but busy streets of the American metropolis and was called “Walking Piece”.
She expressed herself very much through her clothes and the way she painted.
Due to mental disorders she had as a child, it was not easy for her to express herself socially and connect with other people
and so she found a way to make her voice heard through her creations.

Over the years he joined the hippie movement and at the same time, the Kusama look or top to bottom spots was established.
Every styling element, big or small, has the characteristic dots.
Another element of Kusama’s look is the special red short frame that is her signature.

Her style is the repetitive pattern, which is a compulsion of hers, and this is how she created her most famous work,
her pumpkin sculptures that have little dots on them.
For the record, such a pumpkin sculpture by Yiayoi Kusama can cost upwards of $200,000.

What do the dots represent?

For Yiayoi, the dots symbolize her view of the world.
So a man is a dot, a little dot.
Similarly, the earth is a larger dot, made up of so many smaller ones, and so on to infinity.
At the Museum of Modern Art in London there is the Infinity Room, which captures her thinking about the universe and its vastness.

Yayoi Kusama x Louis Vuitton

Their first collaboration came in 2012, when Marc Jacobs was the art director of the label.
In January 2023, they launched an anniversary collection, in which they “took over” all of Harrods and respectively,
the Louis Vuitton store in Paris.
They have placed a huge Yiayoi, who holds her brush and paints, what else?
Voules!

The pattern in the Collection they launched is a bit different from the one in 2012.
In the first collection, the dots had a somewhat different design, similar to the one that places pumpkins in the sculptures,
i.e. dots in the formation of parallel lines that close and open at certain points.

Now, we see a division into 4 sections.
The first section has the dots in colours of white, green, yellow, light blue and scattered dots
designed based on the actual movements Yiayoi makes with her brush.

The second section, Infinity, where we don’t see isometric dots but small and larger ones, as in the universe.
Then we have the metallic dots, which are just silver and metallic.
At the end we have the psychedelic flowers, with bright colours.
You can see the collection in detail on the Louis Vuitton website, here.

People with the story of Yiayoi Kusama, inspire us, give us the strength and motivation to move forward
but also to make our dreams come true.
Because if Yiayoi made it from the backward and deeply conservative closed society of a provincial Japanese society, what can stop you in today’s era when all roads are open?

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I kiss you,
Maria Dretaki